2018/05/22 by Brandon K. Attell, Christopher Cappelli, Christopher J. Cappelli +2 · 22 citations
Medicine · Psychology · #Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes #Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development #Clinical psychology #Developmental psychology #Functional impairment #Gerontology #Item response theory #Maternal Mental Health During Pregnancy and Postpartum #Medicine #Popularity #Psychology #Psychometrics #Scale (ratio) #Social psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/0163278718775797
published in Evaluation & the Health Professions 43(1), 3-15 (SAGE Publishing)
crossref issued 2018/05/22 · crossref published 2018/05/22 · crossref published-online 2018/05/22 · openalex publication_date 2018/05/22 · crossref created 2018/05/22 · crossref published-print 2020/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2026/04/28 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The role of measuring functional impairment holds an important place in research, clinical practice, and service provision for children and adolescents. Responding to the growing need to measure serious emotional disturbances at the local, state, and national level, the Columbia Impairment Scale (CIS) was developed in the early 1990s and has remained one of the several popular scales for assessing functional impairment. However, despite the growing popularity of the instrument in research and practice, only a few studies to date have specifically examined the psychometric properties of the CIS. In this article, we describe the results of the first item response theory analysis of the CIS utilizing nationally representative data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey ( N = 69,966). The results of our analysis lend support to the essential unidimensionality of the CIS and demonstrate that the scale is most reliable for those who exhibit high levels of functional impairment. Given the psychometric properties of the scale identified by our analysis, we contend that the CIS is a viable measure in the ongoing efforts to establish a national epidemiologic surveillance system to track the prevalence and impact of serious emotional disturbances in children and adolescents.